The present invention relates to a system and method for scheduling appointments that is compatible for Internet, intranet, and extranet use. It relates to an asynchronous Internet and intranet-compatible scheduling interface for booking appointments with a professional, such as a doctor, or a professional service, such as a medical testing service (X-rays, blood tests, and the like), even when scheduling details may contain sensitive or highly personal information and when the office of the professional or professional service is closed.
At the present time it is not possible to schedule appointments with a doctor, for example, when the doctor""s administrative offices are closed. Even when the offices are open, it is occasionally difficult to access the administrative office in order to schedule an appointment because of the number of telephone calls that such professionals often receive and the small staff-to-doctor levels used in some practices. At the present time there are also services which, on behalf of such patients, attempt to contact doctors"" offices during the hours when their administrative offices are open and available to schedule appointments. However, even these services have difficulty in that if the doctor""s line is busy or support personnel temporarily on break, they cannot get through to the administrative offices to set an appointment at the time desired and thereby complete the service to their client. It is also not possible for them to schedule appointments when a doctor office is closed.
Medical professionals such as doctors often employ answering services during the hours when their administrative offices are closed, but such services are not in a position to schedule appointments and simply will take messages and pass them on. In some instances such messages are conveyed to the office administrator on the next business day, or in the case of a perceived medical emergency, such messages may be sent to the doctor in the form of a wireless page for him to act on, if he can be reached.
Both circumstances are known to result in increased patient anxiety, in increased risk of aggravating an existing medical condition requiring immediate medical attention and for increasing the loss of care when such callers use more costly services such as hospital emergency rooms when they cannot contact their doctor or adequately satisfy their need for medical advice.
In none of these systems, however, has it been possible for the patient to have access to the doctors"" appointment schedule for the following day or days to enable a patient or other party to schedule an appointment with the doctor at an appointed time. Nor is it possible at the present time to permit such access to schedule an appointment while at the same time protecting the privacy of the person attempting to schedule the appointment, as well as information regarding the doctors"" other appointments.
The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and is directed to a system and method for permitting scheduling of appointments for professionals and professional services when their administrative offices are closed.
Briefly stated, the present invention provides a system and method for scheduling appointments at any time with a professional, such as a doctor, dentist, veterinarian, or the like, or a professional service, such as a medical testing facility and the like, even when the office of the professional or professional service is closed.
As more particularly set forth below, the system and method relate to an asynchronous Internet, intranet, and extranet-compatible 24-hour appointment scheduling interface for making such appointments. As such, they support open-standards architecture, provide an interface for proprietary system architecture, permit off-line review and posting, permit access controls and virus protection, allow central scheduling without loss of distributed control, support encrypted messaging to ensure privacy, and include context-sensitive help.
The system and method also embrace and integrate over the Internet all of the existing office administration scheduling packages for professional offices, such as doctors"" offices, regardless of the platforms used, i.e., PC, Apple or UNIX platforms, thereby permitting users to schedule and confirm, for example, doctor appointments in one consistent interface, regardless of the hardware or software utilized by either the party seeking to schedule an appointment or the individual doctor involved.
It is a general object of the present invention to provide a fully integrated system and method for an asynchronous Internet, intranet- and extranet-compatible scheduling interface for scheduling appointments.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for receiving notification of an available appointment time and for scheduling appointments even when the administrative offices are closed.
It is another object of the present invention to allow for central scheduling without loss of local control.
It is yet another object of the present invention to permit users to schedule and confirm doctors"" appointments in one consistent interface regardless of the computer hardware or software selected by their individual physician and regardless of whether the physicians"" office does or does not utilize a computer.
It is also an object of the present invention to permit users to schedule and confirm doctors"" appointments or medical facility appointments, regardless of the computer hardware or software they employ and even if they do not utilize a computer at all.
It is a further object of the present invention to resolve what has been an historical impediment to the smooth operation of after-hours call centers and doctor answering services, namely to complete the patient service by reviewing all available appointment times for all doctors in a field of specialization and geographic area proximate to the patient, and having selected the best one or several suited, scheduling an appointment when the medical professional""s offices are closed.
It is still another object of the present invention to automate the scheduling process on an enterprise-wide basis and incorporating highly fragmented medical offices and individually-owned physician practices.
It is a feature of the present invention to replace a medical professional""s answering service and traditional beeper and thereby enabling accurate diagnoses of patient conditions and then scheduling the appropriate medical service.
It is another object of the present invention to promote the interoperability of widely-used desktop applications, databases and operating system environments within the deeply fragmented healthcare industry.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to embrace and integrate over the Internet the leading present and future office administration and scheduling packages, contract management programs, personal information manager programs, personal data assistant (PDA) hardware, wireless two-way beepers and wireless beepers running on existing, as well as future desktop and client/server environments.
It is still another feature of the present invention to interface with proprietary electronic data systems for healthcare.
It is a further feature of the present invention to concurrently provide a foundation for easy migration of scheduling applications in the future.
It is a feature of the present invention to permit patients to schedule and confirm doctors appointments within the system interface without having to be concerned that their Web browser may not be directly compatible with the computer hardware or software selected by their physician and, if preferred, without either party being required to utilize a computer.
It is another feature of the present invention to eliminate any concern with hardware or software compatibility, and thereby to provide a seamless user, developer, and administrator capability.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to reduce unnecessary hospital emergency room visits, avoid the aggravations of waiting rooms, increase patient satisfaction, reduce malpractice cases and lower health plan costs by enabling patients to receive timely and accurate information and assistance, as well as to check for availability of and schedule appointments at hours when their physician""s office is closed.
It is still another feature of the present invention to reduce the number of after-hours emergency calls (which do not involve emergency medical assistance) which physicians must handle by shifting these to scheduled appointments during normal office hours.
It is a further feature of the present invention to significantly reduce capital cost and administrative expenses by eliminating any requirement that each physician invest in identical computer hardware, software or dedicated interconnect lines.
It is a feature of the present invention to significantly reduce capital cost and administrative expenses by eliminating any requirement for installing a local-area network (LAN) or wide-area network (WAN) in order to achieve the benefits of the instant invention.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to reduce training and on-going support requirements involved in systems that require proprietary hardware, software, LAN or WAN.
It is still another feature of the present invention to curtail the number of instances when calls are made to request an appointment for an already booked time, or for a time when the doctor is intending to be out of his or her office.
It is a further feature of the present invention to support physicians"" offices that employ a manual calendar method rather than an electronic scheduler or other computer-based systems and methods.
It is another feature of the present invention to enhance the security of the physician""s computer and thereby virtually eliminate the possibility of unknown callers successfully obtaining access to patient records or other data maintained by the physician.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to permit call centers to replace traditional answering services.
It is still another feature of the present invention to reduce overhead for some physicians in the area of medical malpractice insurance premiums in consideration of the significantly improved patient records, consistency and high standards of patient care made possible through employing the instant invention.
It is a further feature of the present invention to enable migration of new computer-based patient record systems and applications as set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 5,301,105.
It is a feature of the present invention to provide for easy migration of new computerbased patient record systems and applications in the future as set forth in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/025,279, filed Feb. 17, 1997 by one of the co-inventors hereof.
It is still another feature of the present invention to permit a caller to quickly check the availability of numerous physicians in order to determine the one who""s availability and geographical location are best suited to the time when an appointment is desired.
It is also a feature of the present invention to incorporate herein the payment verification functions set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 5,301,105.
It is a further feature of the present invention to lay the foundation for incorporating the adjudication and utilization review functions set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 5,301,105.
It is another feature of the present invention to permit numerous organizations and software developers to work in parallel to write enhancements, to customize individual installations and to provide additional functionality for scheduling.
It is still another feature of the present invention to permit each doctor""s office to function autonomously and yet simultaneously to obtain many of the benefits and efficiencies of large, fully-integrated health practices and managed care organizations.
It is still another feature of the present invention to protect the privacy of both the patient desiring to schedule an appointment, as well as any and all patients already included on the physician""s schedule under consideration and review.
It is a feature of the present invention to leave the control over a physician""s calendar in the individual doctor""s office with his or her own administrative personnel.
It is another feature of the present invention to permit its operation asynchronously over the Internet.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to permit appointments to be scheduled both through a call center as well as directly over the Internet.
It is also a feature of the present invention to permit appointments to be confirmed through a coordination center, directly over the Internet, via a wireless two-way beeper or PDA, or over the telephone.
It is still another feature of the present invention to permit use with a wide number of current technologies, including Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer browser applications, as well as numerous third-party workgroup scheduling and calendar programs, contract management programs, PIM applications and PDA programs, written with Netscape open-standards and/or Microsoft ActiveX (OLE) interfaces running on PC, Apple Macintosh and UNIX platforms.
It is a further feature of the present invention to enable inclusion therein of numerous physicians who have not yet upgraded their administrative office computers to newer operating programs, such as Windows, and who still operate using older 386- and 486-based processors.
It is a feature of the present invention to support a DOS-based scheduler solution in order to support older computer systems with very limited memory resources and slower modem speeds.
It is also a feature of the instant invention to permit telephone and wireless communication-based scheduling in order to permit use of the invention by physicians away from their offices and those who do not have any computer hardware or software.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to provide access from all other proprietary legacy development environments, databases and software applications that include scheduling capabilities.
It is still another feature of the present invention to assure smooth inter-operability with future software and physicians"" office productivity templates.
It is a feature of the present invention to allow the individual office administrator to make his or her own decision concerning which computer system, if any, and which scheduling software, if any, they prefer to use.
It is another feature of the present invention to display the same graphical user-interface (GUI) to all callers notwithstanding which hardware or software systems are used in the physician""s office for scheduling.
It is also a feature of the present invention to permit communication of the physicians"" appointment schedules and availability to persons using a telephone in lieu of a computer.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to update the current appointment calendar with the times of any tentative bookings that have been made by other authorized callers after a physician""s administrative offices close.
It is still another feature of the present invention to automatically reserve sufficient time based upon the individual physician""s or medical facility""s procedure requirements.
It is a further feature of the present invention to provide for a tentative booking to be rescheduled after the physician""s office opens.
It is a feature of the present invention to collect any pre-screening and pre-certification information in order to expedite the administrative requirements at the time of the patient""s appointment.
It is another feature of the present invention to remind the patient of any special instructions required for the appointment, such as food prohibitions before tests, records to bring and directions to the physician""s office.
It is yet another feature of the present invention to enhance network security by limiting access to the physician""s computer only to connections made from an authenticated scheduling server.
It is still another feature of the present invention to optimize use of the Internet and World Wide Web as a distribution channel without compromising the vital healthcare and professional service industry considerations of confidentiality, privacy and economics.
It is a further feature of the present invention to provide complete security and an off-site audit trail.
It is a feature of the present invention to allow the physician""s office to keep his or her computer physically disconnected from the Internet, intranet or extranet, except during the batch process of communicating with an authenticated server.